Preschool children's understanding of the situational determinants of others' emotions

Abstract

Two experiments investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children's ability to use situational information to make judgements about others' emotional reactions. Children were presented with stories and drawings depicting other children in emotion-producing situations and were asked to make emotion judgements by selecting one of two facial expressions. It was predicted that children would make more accurate judgements when the stories contained explicit, rather than implicit, statements about the characters' goals. Based on Weiner and Graham's (1984) developmental model of emotion understanding, it was also predicted that the youngest children would be able to make outcomedependent, but not attributiondependent emotion judgements. Contrary to expectation, children did not make significantly more accurate judgements in the explicit story condition. Consistent with Weiner and Graham's model, the 3-year-olds could make outcome-dependent emotion judgements, but only the 4- and 5-year-olds could make attribution-dependent judgements at above chance levels. The findings are interpreted from both a goal-based view and a script-based view of the development of children's emotion judgements.